Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…It totally is what it was. The stated mission of OpenAI was to “Advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” Which is fine as long as the thing that you need to fulfill your mission doesn’t take tens of billions of dollars. Here’s how they would fund it, originally. There was a billion dollars pledged. That came from famously Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston—who (I think) most people don’t realize was part of that initial tranche—and Peter Thiel. Founders Fund (of course) would go on to put massive amounts of money into OpenAI itself later as well. The funny thing is, it was later reported that a billion dollars was not actually collected. Only about $130 million of it was actually collected to fund this nonprofit. For the first few years, that was plenty for the type of research they were doing, the type of compute they needed. Most of that money was going to paying salaries to the researchers. Not as much as they could make at Google and Facebook, but still $1 million or $2 million for these folks.…

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